Deceit will frequently escape immediate detection: but it seldom leaves the person, upon whom it is practised, with that clearness of thought which communicates calm to the mind; producing unruffled satisfaction, and cheerful good temper.
CHAPTER XII
A lawyer and his poetical wife and daughters, or the family of the Quisques: Praise may give pain: A babbler may bite: More of the colouring of cunning: A trader's ideas of honesty, and the small sum for which it may be sold
We quitted the coffee-house; Glibly in high spirits, and Enoch concluding things had been done as they should be: but, for my own part, I experienced a confusion of intellect that did not suffer me to be so much at my ease. I had an indistinct sense of being as passive as a blind man with his dog. Instead of taking the lead, as I was entitled to have done, I was led: hurried away, like a man down a mountain with a high wind at his back: or traversing dark alleys, holding by the coat-flap of a guide of whose good intentions I was very far from having any certainty.
We proceeded however to the house of a solicitor in chancery; who transacted business for the Earl.
Here Glibly, attentive to the plan he had pursued, began by informing Mr. Quisque, the lawyer, that he had come at the request of his dear friend, Trevor, to entreat his aid in an affair of some moment. 'Mr. Trevor is a young gentleman, my dear Quisque, that you will be proud to be acquainted with; a man of talents; a poet; an orator; an author; a great genius; an excellent scholar; a fine writer; turns a sentence or a rhyme with exquisite neatness; very prettily I assure you. I mention these circumstances, my dear Quisque, because I know you have a taste for such things: and so has Mrs. Quisque, and the two Miss Quisques, and all the family. I now and then see very pretty things of their writing in the Lady's Magazine. An elegy on a robin red-breast. The drooping violet, a sonnet. And others equally ecstatic. Quite charming! rapturous! elegant! flowery! sentimental! Some of them very smart, and epigrammatic. It is a family, my dear Trevor, that you must become intimate with. Your merit entitles you to the distinction. You will communicate your mutual productions. You will polish and suggest charming little delicate emendations, to each other, before you favour the world with a sight of them.'
The broadest and coarsest satire was never half so insulting, to the feelings, as the common-place praise of Glibly.
The barren-pated Ellis caught one of the favourite diminutives of Glibly; and finished my panegyric by adding that, 'he must say, his friend, Mr. Trevor, was a prodigious pretty genius.'
Who but must have been proud of such an introduction to the family of the Quisques; by such orators, such eulogists, and such friends?
Acquainted with Glibly, and accustomed to hear him prate, Mr. Quisque seemed to listen to him without surprise, pleasure, or pain. It was what he expected. It was the man. A machine that had no more meaning than a Dutch clock; repeating cuckoo, as it strikes.